Ben Vereen’s Disappearing Divorce

They had been Brooklyn teenagers in love, then parents far too young, and briefly, a married couple: Ben Vereen and Andrea Townsley Vereen. That was more than 50 years ago.

“We’d met in choir,” Mr. Vereen, the actor, singer and dancer, said this week. “She was really cute, and she could sing.”

To support their child, he worked at a textile company — “daytime, for $40 a week,” Mr. Vereen recalled — and performed in the evenings off Off Broadway. “‘The Prodigal Son,’ a little part that paid $15 a week,” he said.

They split up about two years after marrying. Mr. Vereen remarried. Both had children with other partners. They stayed on friendly terms.

Last year, he said, they met in a Brooklyn diner at her request.

“She said we needed to talk about something,” Mr. Vereen said.

He assumed, he said, that the get-together would be about programs they were both supporting to bring arts into the lives of young people.